Author Bill Hogan

Bill Hogan, born and raised in Wheeling, W.Va., is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and worked in the worlds of finance, real estate and alcoholism rehabilitation. Bill has six children and three grandchildren. He and his second wife, Susan Hogan, served in the U.S. Peace Corps from 1987-90 in Benin, West Africa. Now retired, he is a trustee of the Schenk Foundation, an artist, a writer and self-proclaimed “highly skilled dispenser of bull.”

I am Irish, I guess, because I don’t know what else to be. I am half German, but being German never came easy to me.
We are a melancholy lot; I am. That is why we sing and laugh so much, because we are so ve...

Editor's note: The IDEAS page is our place for public opinion, a place where a person can express what concerns them about present-day Wheeling or the world. However, there is one major caveat. The author must ...

I believe it is beautifully ironic that my favorite holiday is identified with the unglamorous turkey. I remember that when we were training for the Peace Corps on Saint Helena’s Island off Beaufort, S.C., we h...

Editor's Note: The Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston has been and continues to be a significant sponsor of Weelunk. The staff and board of directors of Weelunk are grateful the Diocese sees the organization as a f...

“James Samuel Simon, 82, of Wheeling, died Sunday Oct. 7, 2018.”
… so the short obituary starts, with mention of his high school and military service. Really not much to report on his 82 years.
I knew Jim...

Susan and I arrived at our new home in Cove, Benin, in West Africa around the first of October 1987. We were driven the 100 kilometers from the de facto capital Cotonou by a Peace Corps truck with our belonging...

In April, my grandson Tommy turned 10, so I wanted to give him a present that was meaningful to me and hopefully to him. I gave him the circular, metal pan with the sloping sides that I had used to try my luck ...

It was in the 1940s after we emerged the victor in World War II; and not only a winner but a world power. We initiated the Marshall Plan, named after one of most respected and decorated General Officers of tha...

Back in the late '40s and early '50s, we would either hitchhike home from Notre Dame, or four or five of us would split the cost of a car rental. The rental cars had governors that restricted the speed to 60 mp...

May Devotions were held at 7:30 in the evening and were charming. The grade school kids would bring flowers they had picked and file up the side aisle to place them before the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mar...

It was in the late 'forties when I first met Charley. He had one of a large number of Italian restaurants in our area, but Charley’s, the Bella Via, was a bit different in that he also maintained a large gambl...

Brother Jim, 1931 - 2003
Sometime ago someone asked what Jim did. I thought about it for a minute then told them that Jim did Jim Hogan better than anyone I knew. He really was a bit different. One might say...

When I was a small boy in the 1930s, my dad would take me to the Armistice Day ceremony at Linsly Military Institute which was located where the Kroger parking lot is now. It seems to me, in my recall, that pil...

Pete was not a regular in our crowd but was around enough to the extent that he should have been. We knew each other, went to the same parties, but I believe he was a bit older. Pete had an older brother, a han...

The tennis courts four and five are gone. I drove through Crispin Center with my buddy Rory, a thoroughbred mutt a lot like the driver and saw the work in progress. There was a big commercial dumpster parked th...

Babe, I believe his last name was Hert, was in Saint Michaels grade school with my oldest sister Kay when the school was located one block up from Edgington Lane. It is an apartment building now. I believe they...

My son, Neil, was home from Africa after spending two years in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa, and another year or so working with some Italian Missionaries in Uganda. We were having lunch in this trippy ...

* Title attributed to E. E. Cummings
The other evening I attended a musical program at Wheeling Jesuit University. Looking up from a table of delicious desserts after the performance, I saw Mary Hamm across th...

We arrive at “the age of reason” at the ripe old age of 7, if I recall correctly what I was taught years ago. It was decided by the church that a person of that vintage was experienced and seasoned sufficiently...

I started dating Mary Ann in the late 1940s. Incidentally, dating in my day was asking a girl out for the evening for a movie, a dance etc. Her father, Andy Hess, had bought Table Rock Farm in the early 1930s. ...

The Wheeling Country Club was still where Stratford Springs restaurant is located today. I was home for just a couple of weeks from a treatment facility for alcoholism and our friends were having a brunch for t...

I remember when the entrance to the Riley Law Building was on Chapline Street. One went through the doors and up a short flight of marble steps; I believe there was like a concierge behind a little counter to h...

There were two big dances during the Christmas season, the White Ball and the Charity Ball. These were formal dances held at the Fort Henry Club. The young ladies wore all white, floor length evening gowns for ...

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails....

I first met Lou right after World War II. I was a juvenile delinquent for the norms of that era and Lou had a bar just over the Junior Avenue bridge in Elm Grove appropriately named “Lou’s”. The city of Wheelin...

I don’t think I am different from anyone else in that I thought everyone was raised like I was. It wasn’t until I moved out of my neighborhood and got a little life experience that it began slowly to dawn on m...

The biggest day of my life was the morning I put on my new knickers with the brand new leather lace-up knee boots with the pen knife in a special holster. It was attached to the outside of the right boot halfwa...

I started in the securities brokerage business in 1957 with a Cincinnati firm named Westheimer & Co. It was a regional firm as most were in those days. The president of the firm was a venerable old gentlema...

By Bill Hogan
Weelunk Contributor
Doodad and Bebe
I met Mary Ann’s grandparents when I first dated her. She lived way out in the country, and at that time the roads were a lane and a half and very bump...

by Bill Hogan
I think of the Wheeling of my young years as a time when the city was booming. City streets were full of pedestrian and vehicular traffic competing with streetcars for a place in the flow. Down...

I don’t know a lot about horses. What little familiarity I have is mostly from betting them. I worked at Wheeling Downs when it was a half-mile horse track back when I was in school, but that comes later.
Ba...

Editors' Note: Bill Hogan has offered to share with us a series of his recollections about life in long-ago Wheeling.
It seems truly strange to me today to put myself back in the early 1940s, when I was bare...